Patrick Leigh Fermor RIP

Monty Pigeon · 14th June 2011, 03:29 PM

Died last week aged 96. One of the greatest Englishmen of our time.

If you are unfamiliar with his life, and, especially, his heroics on Crete during WWII, this is worth a read:

http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2006-05-22#folio=058

AB22 Easy Tiger · 14th June 2011, 03:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Monty Pigeon

Died last week aged 96. One of the greatest Englishmen of our time.

If you are unfamiliar with his life, and, especially, his heroics on Crete during WWII, this is worth a read:

http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2006-05-22#folio=058

Indeed. Set off to walk to Istanbul at the age of 18 then took 40 years to write the book(s) inspired by the journey. Wonderful books they are too.

I like the story of when he kidnapped the German General who was in charge of the forces on Crete:

Quote:

The kidnap took place in April 1944. With permission from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo, Paddy and his team of British commandos and Cretan guerrillas stopped Kreipe's car as made its way to HQ in Heraklion. With the general pressed down on the vehicle's floor, Paddy donned his uniform and set off towards a prearranged hiding-place with the captive on board. The German chauffeur had been carried off and killed by the Cretans, much to the displeasure of Paddy, who had wanted to keep the operation bloodless in order to reduce the chance of reprisals.

Before reaching safety, they had to pass through several roadblocks and were saved only by Paddy's command of German. The strange company – Paddy, the general and W Stanley Moss (author of the book Ill Met by Moonlight) slept in caves for a month until it was safe to have Kreipe removed to Egypt. Passing the time one day, Kreipe began to recite some lines from Horace's ode Ad Thalictrum. The Latin syllables caught his captor's ear. "As luck would have it, it was one of those I knew by heart." After the general had run out of steam, Paddy carried on through the remaining 40 lines to the end. "We got on rather better after that." In 1972, an almost equally unlikely event occurred, when the pair were reunited on a Greek version of This Is Your Life.

Grauniad